Reply to divorce from an adult child view

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]See, it's not just visiting one *home*.  It's visiting one family (mom and her boyfriend), with everything they want to do and everywhere they want to go.  And then visiting another (dad and his wife) with their activities and everything.  Both sides are trying to cram their stuff into half the time.  And there's way more people to plan around and compromise with-- stepsiblings and the boomers' own parents and everything.

Eventually I had to put my foot down and refuse to leave either house to visit new-partner extended family.  They come to us or we don't see them.  But because my mom is trying to play Matriarch of a Big Happy Family, she's constantly going on about how all "the cousins" (meaning my kids and her boyfriend's grandkids) get along so well.  But of course we're not a happy family, they don't get along, and I'm not willing to invest any time or effort in this charade.  But this is the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say "dragging my kids around"-- it's not just going to their houses, it's the whole holiday dealie.  And no matter what time of year it is, they're going to be trying to cram their stuff into half the time, and trying to make me spend time with various people that I don't care about and would literally never see again if they broke up.

Much of this has to do with your parents' and relatives' personalities though, rather than the fact they are divorced.[/quote]

Well yes.  But even if we didn't go anywhere, it's still exhausting and a pain to deal with little kids across two houses.  And I don't think it's realistic to expect that there wouldn't be any extended family time or whatever.  A big part of the problem is that my parents are trying to have the lifestyle that they want, which is basically a happy normal family except with a different partner.  But it's not possible to have that unless everyone else goes the extra mile to make it happen.  That's what divorced parents of adult children need to accept-- you can't just start over with a new partner and pretend like the first marriage didn't happen.  It's always going to be a joint custody kind of situation.  You're never going to fully have the family you want.  None of us are.[/quote]

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